Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

Chapter One

In which we set out on an adventure to make fire and cook a meal. We meet a couple looking for somewhere to sleep, and Nilse, who knows a thing or two about fire. A young man arrives from Berlin with a bottle of rum.

We’d long wondered what it would be like, sitting out at night, by a fire, cooking, smelling the damp birch trees, feeling semi-darkness and silence around us. We’d been thinking about it for a long time – too long really. One evening this week we finally packed our car with enough gear for a week’s camping trip and set off for a quiet spot by the river where we knew there was a safe place to make a fire.

We thought it possible someone in a motor home might have beaten us to it. As we drove into the parking area there was a car in the corner and two shadowy figures hunched up next to it, drinking from mugs. Further on there was another car, empty. Turning the corner we were delighted to see the spot was still free. Then we sensed something – two people sitting inside the hut behind us, damn.

This wouldn’t have mattered at all – one shouldn’t be territorial about nature after all – except that we were ashamed of our poor fire-making skills and didn’t want someone to have a ringside view. Pride, it’s a terrible thing. We had to rise above it. We were going to do it anyway. When we started walking to the car to collect out things the couple came out as well. We were thinking of having a fire, we said, is that ok? Of course, they said, we’re just in the hut arranging our things. We smiled nervously at one another.

Rolf got off to a good start, an encouraging lick of fire gave us confidence. The river rippled by our feet in the fading light, a bright dusk. The water was pink in the light of the setting sun. Peaceful, we thought.

Within minutes we could no longer see the water because a wide plume of thick smoke was drifting over the river and we were responsible. It was so damp underneath, complained Rolf, in his defence. We watched the smoke increase with growing unease, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, and our fire.

A man appeared round the corner of the hut on a quad bike. Were we in trouble? Yes, we were guilty of very poor fire-making skills, we knew it.

Hello, I said, and smiled. He smiled back and walked straight over to the fire, and as he approached we added – rather unnecessarily – we were just making a fire. The man just nodded. He was down on his hands and knees on the wet grass blowing life back into our fire.

No no, he said, you need to give it more air. He pulled up a trunk of wood to perch on, and continued to attend to our smoky fire. Soon the smoke decreased, the wood began to burn. He introduced himself – his name was Nilse, and he lived here by the river. We introduced ourselves.

The three ‘Ts’ he said were needed for our fire; time, temperature, and turbulence. We had time, we decided, and the temperature was beginning to rise. The turbulence was provided by Nilse’s frequent blowing, during which he nearly disappeared from view in the smoke. Now, what were the three things we needed for the fire? We repeated them like good students, and he beamed. We had feeling he’d given this lesson here before.

Another man appeared, a blonde young man, who sat down with us on the bench. From Berlin, he was spending the night in the car park because his car had broken down and he needed to get it into Kiruna tomorrow for it to be mended. He came with a bottle of rum.

He and I spoke English, Rolf and Nilse Swedish. The river now had a red glow to it. Nilse was talking about the local area, while Rolf talked about a man who sang joik in the church this week that we’d been to hear – ah yes Nilse knew him, he was related, did we know about – ?

Meanwhile the Man from Berlin was telling me about some very strange times he’d had on the way here, and a wild night out he had with strangers in a town much further south.

We’d expected a quiet solitary experience, not a loud, sociable one, but we were glad anyway how things were turning out. All four of us sitting there, talking a lot, sharing our experiences, watching the river and the fire.

Chapter Two

In which the fire is slow to grow, rum is consumed by some of the party and there is music. Two men fail to manage the fire and the cooking, and one of them falls into it. Autumn arrives.

It was getting late but still we hadn’t eaten. The embers of the fire were only just beginning to glow – only thanks to Nilse’s blowing, and rearranging of sticks and wood.

Pulling out some large red-spotted mugs, the Man from Berlin offered everyone some rum. We said no thankyou – Rolf was driving – but Nilse took a mug, and his eyes invited a large measure, which was duly poured out.

We continued to talk, Swedish on my right (Rolf and Nilse), English on my left (me and the Man from Berlin).

At one point Nilse began to joik (sing), responding to Rolf’s questions about the tradition. We felt a bit awkward, not wanting to make such a demand, but honoured to have the experience. We listened intently, all of us, until Nilse’s memory lost the feel of the thing, and he stopped suddenly. After a few seconds of respectful silence, the conversation picked up again.

On my right, Swedish, on my left, English. The Man from Berlin was in a band, a drummer. We had had musicians to stay with us in our bed and breakfast, I said, and we even went to see them in California. We both talked about music, bands we had in common. He went off to his car and returned clutching a CD of his own music, a present. We’d had live joik, and now, recorded music from Berlin. It was an unpredictable evening.

I was tuning in to both languages, trying to keep up with all the stories. Someone we knew of, a local, had died – we were sad about that, which was odd, since we’d never met the man, only heard someone sing about him. Nilse knew him, and we felt we knew him. It was all very sad, how he died. How can one carry on living? We were all sad. The Man from Berlin was sad too – he’d lost his girlfriend. She hadn’t died, but she’d left him, very cruelly. We were all sad together. More rum was poured.

Time to put sausages and vegetables on the fire. Nilse stood up from his wooden trunk to assist, staggered towards the fire, and fell in it. He rolled to one side in surprise and lay there, stunned. All three of us rushed over to help him. He was a large man and our pulling made no impact whatsoever. Eventually we were able to steady him as he got up of his own accord, and we directed him to sit on a more stable wooden bench. The Man from Berlin hid the bottle of rum under the table.

On my right, Swedish, on my left, English. The Man from Berlin was thinking of coming to stay with us, and wanted our phone number. I couldn’t remember it, but Rolf would. I asked him. No no no, said Nilse, no phone numbers. Oh? We weren’t sure why – was he trying to protect us? He seemed to be a guardian angel of a kind.

It seems he had more influence than we’d thought. I couldn’t get Rolf to remember the number at all, which was so unusual. He was distracted, forgetful. As I watched him trying to manoeuvre sausages that were catching fire, and failing, it occurred to me that he must be drunk, like Nilse. Then I remembered, he hadn’t had anything to drink.

Three hours had passed and we still hadn’t anything to eat, and being diabetic his sugar levels had sunk too low.

Meanwhile Rolf and Nilse were insistent about their roles in managing the cooking, both of them pulling the grill in the wrong direction and leaning precariously over the fire, talking at cross-purposes in stilted Swedish and occasional Sami and looking at each other in puzzlement after each of them spoke.

This was not going to work. The monsters of chaos (children of the God of Mischief) were in our midst.

The temperature dropped dramatically. A soft grey mist swirled over the moving water, floating into the pink sky where it joined the clouds. It’s summer-autumn, said Nilse, looking up into the sky, happily. It’s beautiful.

Chapter Three

In which sausages are not eaten, but someone’s breakfast is eaten instead. We see where Nilse lives, and meet a cat that can open doors. Everyone retires to their beds for the night.

I looked to where the Man from Berlin was standing, by the river talking with the couple who had just come out of the hut. They were clutching their toothbrushes, a sure sign they were not organising their things in the hut but instead hoping to stay in it (which isn’t allowed) without anyone knowing.

There were a few things to be sorted first. Rolf and Nilse continued to make no progress with the sausages, and failed to understand what each other were talking about.

Occasionally Nilse would look at me and say, ‘dammit, woman!’, as if he was trying out the phrase, unsure of its impact. It was mad entertainment, but I needed to focus on the hunt for sugar or these moments of happy madness would soon be turning sour.

I shared my concerns with the Man from Berlin. He went straight to his car and returned with a large bar of chocolate – his breakfast, he said. It was an offering, a sacrifice (on his part) to appease the monsters of chaos. Rolf was easily persuaded to consume it, while Nilse insisted on equal portions (‘dammit, woman!’ between mouthfuls). The sausages and aubergines were left to turn black on the fire.

As Rolf recovered, Nilse slumped. The couple disappeared with their toothbrushes, and it was time for us all to turn in. But the evening wasn’t over yet. Nilse wanted to show us his home. We said goodbye to the Man from Berlin, who would be sleeping in his car. Rolf climbed gamely onto the quad bike, but instinct told me one of us needed to keep their feet on the ground. After edging his way out onto the road, Nilse took a sharp turn right onto a track and he and Rolf disappeared on into the dark, leaving me to wonder if he’d remember when to stop.

When I caught up with them they were waiting by the river, watching Nilse’s cat – ‘the only woman of the house’ – creep around an outbuilding. His house had a wonderful view of the mist rising over the river and was a cosy place to sit and talk. He tried to teach us some Sami words, but we were not good students, at least not at midnight after an evening of little food. He talked about different branches of his family, and we’d heard of some of these people, and were interested to hear his history.

We were in the middle of a story when suddenly he stopped talking, hearing a loud buzzing. Aha, he winked at us. Some kind of mobile phone, we guessed. A light was flashing on some apparatus on the fireplace. But Nilse went to open the door. He was talking to someone. Who could be arriving at this time of night?

After a few minutes his cat crept in and made herself comfortable at our feet. It was, as I said, an unpredictable evening.

We said goodbye, thanked him for his hospitality, and walked back to where our car was parked near the river. It was dark. The couple had decided to sleep in their car, and the Man from Berlin was asleep in his.

The evening had taken an unexpected turn, ending with a cat that pressed a buzzer to be let in through the front door. We’d thought, when we set off earlier, that it would be a quiet evening – just the two of us, the growing darkness and the sound of the river. And now, finally, it was.

At this time in August two thousand trekkers descend on the fjäll (mountain area) outside Kiruna, beginning their trek in Nikkaluokta, ending in Abisko. There’s a staggered start, and some people complete it in one day, others in six. People come from all over the world to take part. Everyone has to camp, take minimum equipment – waterproofs, cooking facilities, sleeping bag, tent – but otherwise you walk at your own pace, stop where you want, camp where you want, and eventually arrive in Abisko.

It happens every year, and every year it is over-subscribed. We always have some people staying here, the day before or after the end of the trek, and so far we have only heard good things about the experience. It isn’t a trek for solitary wanderings, but it’s a companionable, reassuringly safe way to experience the beauty of the fjäll.

For sure, it has its difficulties. It’s 110 kilometres, so no walk in the park. If it rains, which it inevitably will, you have to manage wetness over a period of days. Then there is the ever-present insect threat – mosquitoes, midges, flies. It can be very windy and a tent not expertly put up may tumble (on the other hand, more wind means less insects). There’s nowhere to stop on the way for cafe latte or a beer (well there is one place actually, Kebnekaise Fjällstation, but that’s just on the first day) and so it’s dried food and water all the way. No, whatever you think about the idea of sharing the fjäll with two thousand other hikers, it’s an experience and an achievement for anyone who does it.

But we haven’t. Keep promising ourselves we’ll do it another time, without all the people and razzmatazz. That’s how it is, how one makes excuses not to do things. It’s still on our list. Yesterday we were somehow drawn out to the area, but we drove to the end of the trek in Abisko to view a small exhibition of tapestries by Erika Juhl, a German artist.

We enjoyed the exhibition, and outside the STF (hostel) building we saw the finishing post for the trek, the refreshment tent, the first aid tents. It was too early to see people arriving, although unbelievably we later read that some people had completed the trek (running) in 15 hours.

Returning to Kiruna we couldn’t resist the lure of Lapporten, the green land rising up from the E10 to a wide semi-circular shape visible in the mountains overhead.

We took a limited amount of gear – insect repellent, bottle of water, sitting mat – and headed up just a short distance from the road through the birch scrub. The sun was warm but not too hot, the air still, and the greenery under feet remarkably dry and easy to walk on. We walked slowly to a small tarn where we had sat the previous winter in the snow.

There was something very odd though, very odd indeed about the feeling of the walk. We walked easily, and when we arrived at the water’s edge we sat on the ground and stared into the sunshine, untroubled – totally untroubled by insects.

We reflected on whether we had just been unlucky in the past, not to find these insect-free places, or on whether the hot weather had dried out their habitat so much they had moved elsewhere. Unconvinced, our thoughts turned to the Big Trek.

All those people out in the fjäll, slathered in insect repellent, lying all night in their tents.

I reckoned that, somehow, the insect population had put out a flyer, an advertisement, laid out not in words but in scents. It would have ‘read’ something like this:

FEAST IN THE FJÄLL

This week you are warmly invited to a Feast in the Fjäll.

Please note: this is a girl only event!

This event – sponsored by Fjällräven, the well-known clothing suppliers – will provide enough blood for one million girl mosquitoes or other blood-sucking insects to nourish thousands of millions of eggs, and it ensures that we can continue to party out in the fjäll for the rest of the season, and even another year.

The sponsors have kindly ensured that all the blood supplies will be available outside for most of this week, and no physical barriers (walls, doors) will be there to discourage us.

We’ll smell you there. Now buzz off!

When we moved here we were, and still are, foreigners. I really am one, and Rolf is from a different part of Sweden and nearly as much of a foreigner. We never expected to be thought of as locals but we hope to be accepted as a positive force in the local community. We wouldn’t want to offend anyone, or look as if we don’t care.

Sometimes, though, we do things differently. We don’t mean to. It’s just that it’s hard to change routines and assumptions. At the same time we guard against being critical of the differences. I think we’ve a lot to learn from our neighbours and others in Kiruna.

We try and follow the patterns. This is the day the rubbish is collected, and no, you don’t leave your bin facing that way or it won’t be collected. You don’t leave your car there in the winter because it will be in the way of the snow-clearing machine. If you want to go to the airport you don’t tell the local taxi company when to arrive at the right time for the flight, they tell you. Those kind of things.

Then there are local habits, which may be harder to follow. Barbecues, for instance, if you aren’t keen on barbecuing. The start of the spring fishing season, if you don’t have a snow scooter to take you there and don’t know one end of a fishing rod from the other. Classic American car cruising, and hobby tractors – well, enough said.

There are habits you just can’t see the point in following – for example, model windmills in the front garden, and Christmas decorations up for six month of the year.

So you can only go so far in trying to be a local. At some point and in some areas you have to say, well this is the way we do things and as long as it doesn’t offend anyone else then we’ll just carry on.

One of those areas is gardens. I love gardens, but that’s gardens in a warm climate. Here where the ground can be snow covered most of the year not only is it more difficult but it loses some of its appeal. I haven’t kept up the same high standard of maintenance of flower beds, and there has been nothing approaching a lawn out the back since we moved in.

This is partly because we refuse to buy a lawnmower. I know I know, it’s extreme, but hear me out. The grass grows super fast in the continuous light, and we’re often not here at the crucial time the snow melts, so by the time we arrive back it’s already too high for a lawnmower. We decided instead on a combination of a scythe, and a trimmer to deal with the heavy duty cutting back that is required. Having done that fairly early this year we are now left with grass which should be cut with a lawnmower to keep it in trim. But the truth is, we don’t like trim lawns. Never have. I ripped out the lawn at the back of our house in England and replaced it with earth and bushes. It has associations of suburbia, of caring too much about manicured lawns rather than other more important things. A neat lawn is not something we’ve ever wanted to see around our house, so we don’t have a lawnmower.

(We use a scythe, not a lawnmower.)

Not much of our land is visible to neighbours, so we hope it doesn’t upset them too much, our straggly grass. We thought this was a habit we might get away with.

Something strange has just happened though. We’ve begun to think about buying a lawnmower. The thing is, we always thought a lawnmower was to make nice lawns, but we see there may be another reason all our neighbours keep such neat suburban-looking lawns. Two words: damn insects. The more you cut the grass the less insects there are around. So soon we may have a lawnmower like everyone else.

We’re learning that behaving like a local is not so much a lifestyle choice, more about just doing what’s practical.

Another thing. As we were clearing away the low lying tree branches I so loved last year, having realised they’re a haven for biting flies, I had another revelation. If we put up our Christmas lights now, before all that obstructive snow arrives, then it will be so much easier to position them where they look best.

Mm, putting up the Christmas decorations in August. Slowly but surely we’re inching our way towards becoming almost locals.

We were out on a summer walk that we do every year, out near the mine, on empty tracks through the scrub, wondering if we could see any changes in the land, in the area that is subsiding around the mine.

Occasionally there are dramatic news stories about Kiruna – written by people who don’t live here – as if we live in daily danger. The reality is rather more prosaic. There’s no mining activity underneath where people actually live – that’s why they need to move the town in the future – so there’s no danger of us falling into the pit as it is sometimes portrayed. But it’s true that the mining activity comes closer and closer, and you can’t help but be aware of it. We’re used to the blasts at 01.25 every night. Sometimes you can’t hear them at all, sometimes you hear and feel a tremor. We’re not disturbed by this. But now there are many more what they call ‘seismic events’ that are noticeable in town.

A ‘seismic event’ is an earthquake by another name, and no-one is surprised this happens. The mining company are taking iron ore out of the rock, and when they remove it they leave a hanging wall above, and eventually, parts of this fall. When a large part falls they call it ‘an expected seismic event’.

We had one of those a couple of nights ago. It’s a thud and a shudder when you don’t expect it. Our wooden house does seem to move, and it’s funny that our first thoughts were not of the mine – it felt like a lorry had driven into the house. A few seconds later and the thought of ‘seismic event’ reassured us this was probably not the case. After that you wonder about the area of subsidence and how fast it grows now. So we went out for a walk on the wild side.

It’s quiet out there, as you’d expect. Giant steel tubes glint in the sun, measuring points to track how the land is moving. The birds and wildflowers don’t mind, they’re having a whale of a time where the road no longer goes.

Dead end roads are one of Kiruna’s specialities. You don’t need a navigation system to find your way out of Kiruna – there are only four roads out and two of them are dead ends within an hour or two. Until the 1980s (when they built the road to Norway) Kiruna itself was a dead end. There wasn’t even a road to it until the 1930s. In the winter leaving town you can only turn right or left.

In the summer, however, a lot more roads appear in the landscape – in fact it’s littered with them, though most of them are out of use, and all of them are dead ends. Some of them are roads up to summer houses, not used at all in the winter and so not visible then. Most of the roads that appear in the summer are ghost roads, ways that people used to travel, by cart and horse, or later by car. Anywhere else these abandoned roads would be built on, or used for new housing developments. Here they’re just left as reminders of the ways once travelled. Like wrinkles in the face of the landscape, they’re evidence that the area has a past.

You can trace the changing shape of the town in its roads. The big road news at the moment is that the main road through town, the E10, has to be moved somewhere else – because of the mine subsidence – so there are preparations to build it skirting north rather than south of town. Even nearer to the mine is one of the four roads out of town, the road to the dead end of Nikkoluokta. It’s already too close to the pit, so a new road is currently being built, and by the looks of things there will be a giant new roundabout to connect it to the E10.

Some other roads will soon, rather literally, be a dead end – the ones pointing in the direction of the growing pit. There is much hoo-hah about the town moving and what will happen, as if it’s something new. But locals will tell you that it has been happening in the town for the last fifty years. In the early twentieth century the area nearest the mine was full of small wooden houses and some factory buildings. This area was called Ön, which means ‘The Island’. It wasn’t an island, except that it had the mine on one side, the lake on another, and the railway on the other, and it was at the foot of the hill on which Kiruna town currently stood, so they perhaps felt themselves rather cut off from town life. However, in its early days Kiruna gloried in the splendour of its own tram line which took workers to the mine, and the tramline went through Ön.

Ön began to disappear in the 70s, as the ground slowly gave way to subsidence. By the end of the 70s most of it had gone – buildings abandoned, factories closed. The area of Ön – now at a fallen, lower level, next to the growing pit – is a green oasis, home to a million mosquitoes and many colourful wildflowers. Peering down at it from a summer road nearby (a road barely used, from which you can see many measuring markers of the subsidence) you can still the see the old roads down there, cracked and broken, marking the spaces that were between buildings that no longer exist.

It has been happening in Kiruna for a long time, land falling lower, people having to move, roads falling into disuse, nature taking over. It’s a kind of natural dead end, where Nature can take back her own.

Have you ever heard, children, of the bad taste fairy? She lives in the far away kingdom of Kiruna.

Once upon a time she was employed by the local council, in the ‘Arts and Recreation’ department, where helping people’s dream come true was her speciality, and very good she was at it too. But with the cutbacks and everything she found that this year her funding had gone to the ‘Konstmuseet i Norr’ (‘The North’s Art Museum’) project instead. This left the bad taste fairy without a job and too much time on her hands.

According to its home page, ‘The North’s Art Museum’ doesn’t exist yet – rather like the rest of ‘the new Kiruna’ it’s just an idea in someone’s head, waiting for someone to agree to build it – so instead this art project ‘takes art to the viewer and creates a fluid structure that promotes new ways of viewing art’.

Mmm. The bad taste fairy decided she couldn’t sit around waiting for art to appear in a non-existent museum. There were lots of spaces in Kiruna, which sometimes, let’s be honest, looked a bit drab, and they needed something doing about them NOW.

‘I’ll wave my magic wand and create some fun new things for the town, and then they’ll realise what a useful fairy I am and give me my job back’.

So she set to work. First she flew down the big hill until she came to opposite ’68 degrees bed and breakfast’ and a nice open area of grass. There was a large rock sitting in the middle of the space. ‘Mmm,’ she thought, ‘That’s a bit dull. I’m sure I can do something with that’. And do something she did.

The raven flew overhead and surveyed her artwork. It looked to him like blood on the rocks, or maybe creeping spot disease, either way not somewhere he’d like to spend time, and so he flew on by.

(The thing about the bad taste fairy was that she didn’t know she had bad taste. If she’d stopped to think, just for a moment….. it was on her mother’s side, her mother’s father always wore very baggy trouser (good for concealing the tail) and could have been a troll. The troll gene might have been passed down the line. It wasn’t bad taste so much as different taste. The bad taste fairy thought she had an eye for what looked good, and she did. At least for what looked good to her.)

Next the bad taste fairy flew into the centre of town which she decided needed a bit of cheering up. She liked birds, but most of them on the ground were just too small to see, and she had an idea for something really charming for everyone to look at.

It’s a ‘giron’, the white bird that Kiruna takes its name from. Only it’s a giant version of a giron. When the raven flew over and saw the giron he thought he’d seen the ghost of his great grandfather raven (returned as a giant white bird spirit) and he flew off as fast as he could.

Then the bad taste fairy flew to the edge of the town, and thought she would build something bright and wonderful that could be seen from far away. She couldn’t decide whether it should be natural looking, or artificial looking, so she made it a bit of both. So here it is, ‘Totem’.

In fact the bad taste fairy slipped up a bit here. She wasn’t sure she liked it – even she thought it might have been in bad taste. Such bad taste in fact, that some local people (including me) think it’s really good. The raven flying overhead wasn’t keen though – no good place to perch and far too brightly coloured for him.

Worried she’d lost her touch she rushed back into town. In the town square, in the middle of the car park, she erected a tall metal structure which looked like a pylon gone wrong, or a rocket half built, or maybe a bit of junk piled high to look like a tower. She liked it, and here it was, right in the centre of town.

The raven looked down on the tower. It didn’t look like much to him, but – hang on a minute – maybe it had some value after all.

So now the raven lives at no. 1, Raven Towers.

The bad taste fairy still hasn’t got her job back in ‘Arts and Recreation’ but is wondering if she has a future in Housing. Kiruna needs some good ideas for housing and she might be the right fairy for the job.

Between clusters of birch trees, sheep munch on greenery, eyeing me through the rope fence. I’m walking through Gruvstads park. It’s a peaceful scene. There are gently sloping paths leading to benches, a place to view some homely chickens, a wood store and a place to barbecue, and children’s swings.

Paths meander pleasantly through the park, passing fine examples of Kiruna’s old houses – the Chief Engineer’s house, for instance, and the mining company’s own hotel – visited by the great and the good of Sweden from 1910 onwards. (During the previous King’s visit, our neighbour’s son was called in to mend a broken window frame. In those days, Kiruna did royal visits in style.) The first mine director, Lundbohm – credited with establishing the town of Kiruna – lived in a small unpretentious house here, with a good view out over the mine. The building is still there, now a museum and a café.

Appearances in this town, though, can be deceptive. Round the corner from all this serenity and the calmly munching sheep is this:

Beyond the fence you can see where the land has collapsed just in front of the mine’s main office building. It was a road I can remember running down twenty years ago. Since then the land has collapsed, and the road has had to be shut off for safety reasons. This is the hole that will eventually swallow up the town, and first in line is Gruvstads park.

Something new just appeared in Gruvstads park – giant reproductions of photographs of old Kiruna, positioned so they show the scene roughly where you stand, so you can compare them to what’s there today. In Kiruna an exhibition of something is a sure sign that it’s about to disappear. In the town hall now there’s an exhibition about the English architect Ralph Erskine who designed the blocks of flats known as ‘the spitting cup’ and ‘the Berlin wall’. You can see Gruvstads park from these flats – they’re just the other side of the road….

In the mine’s own special language, Gruvstads park is ‘a moving oasis’. To you and me, that’s a park which is repeatedly moved as parts of it fall into a pit. The area marked out on town plans is wider than the current park – it includes roads, the railway station (already out of use – there’s a hut up the road now instead), the town hall, the library, housing and shops. This is Gruvstads park 1, and slowly all those roads and buildings will be emptied, knocked down and the area will become a park, and then later, a pit.

There was a big fanfare a few weeks ago when the local council signed an agreement with the mine about compensation to the town for this area. The council are pleased – now they have the money to rebuild the public buildings. It looks like an agreement to help them ‘kick-start’ (as they keep saying) the building of the new town (and God knows they need a kick-start, or maybe just a kick). The trouble is, they’ve left negotiations over businesses and housing to the mine to sort out, and we don’t know how or when this will happen. So only part of the town is ready to be rebuilt. Will there be a town of public buildings in one place, and the rest of us still living somewhere else?

It’s a confusing picture. But we do know that in years to come there will be plenty of places where sheep may safely graze.

There’s a time for swinging in the breeze and a time for working, and over the last week the two have been as well balanced as my new hammock. In this extraordinary weather (‘don’t expect to see it for another hundred years,’ says our neighbour) the bridge railings, an outhouse building, and part of a side of the house has been painted, the meadow has been cut back, all the cuttings removed, an overgrown bush has been severely trimmed, and next winter’s wood supply has been chopped into manageable pieces. Sometimes we’ve even complained about the heat, and twice I’ve been to a nearby lake to swim – the first time the water has been anything other than blisteringly cold.

Despite three weeks of heatwave, nearby wildlife apparently has no need of the water put out by me (a reflex reaction by me after years of living in more urban environments). In sharp contrast, my time in the hammock has been spent, usefully, reading a book about the problem of water shortages in the American west – or rather, the problem of people expecting water and other people delivering it. Here, on the other hand, the ground is so steeped in water it never dries out. In my view any plants not cunning enough to reach sources of water in this landscape don’t deserve to live, and that is my excuse for not watering the flowers (planted by the previous owner, in need of watering according to our neighbour).

I don’t wish to be smug, but there is something calming about the feeling that you live in a landscape that looks after itself. Of course, it doesn’t, the observant of you might say, since I’ve complained rather too often about the hard work of removing overgrown grasses in summer and snow piles in winter. But I know that all we need to do is to allow our land to become birch scrub, and stop wanting to use a garage in the winter, and nearly all of this work would be gone. Another few years maybe, and we might give up struggling against nature.

Here more than anywhere else it’s clear the struggle is futile. To start with this can feel depressing, if you’re an achiever, but soon it’s a relief. You can’t win, you can only try. The secret of the happiness brought by the activity of gardening, they say, is that you never finish it, so the happiness is constantly renewed.

Which brings me to parenting. I have heard it said that parenting these days is a lifelong responsibility. Nature has organised things rather differently it seems. I wanted to find out more about the arctic hares in our garden, since our resident hare has just had a litter of four bright-eyed young (‘leverets’) that scurry around at night investigating our grass piles. According to internet sources, the ‘polar rabbit’ feeds its young for eight weeks. After that they’re on their own.

Now we’re on Hare Watch at about midnight every night (still broad daylight here), when all the young hares instinctively gather together in a small pile outside our window and wait for the mother to arrive. They rub against one another, groom one another, climb on top of one another, turn their backs on each other – all in a small space about the size of a mother hare’s belly. We wait. She appears within a thirty minute time gap, and right there in the middle of the road (thankfully empty at that hour) the four young are fed for a maximum of three minutes, before she leaps off somewhere else. We don’t know how old they were when we first spotted them, so how much longer all this goes on is unclear.

It means we go to bed rather late every night, but somehow we just can’t resist waiting to see if she comes. Every night we wonder if this might be their last night. Or she may not appear, and what happens then? Do they sit out there all night, just waiting? Do we?

A couple of days ago I sat by a lake, after a refreshing swim. It was Friday night, the end of the working week. Some of Kiruna’s youth were evidently out in small boats on the lake, heading for a stationary houseboat in the centre. There was much whooping and shrieking, and although I couldn’t easily see their antics from where I sat – there were people leaping into the water and back on the houseboat – I could hear them.

I sat there for a few hours. During that time the boat activity lessened and I could just about make out their figures huddled together on the top deck of the houseboat. The whooping had turned to singing (no doubt with the lubricant of alcohol), or almost singing – it was hard to tell the tunes. The wailing continued, and was soon joined by the howling of husky dogs on the other side of the lake.

There they all were, in a small pile, on top of the houseboat, waiting. I left, so I never found out what happened next.

We’ve been away for two months and hardly recognise the place we left. It isn’t just that the snow has gone, more that our world has been turned upside down. It’s 27 degrees of heat in a verdant, buzzing landscape where the sun (literally) never sets. The once silent frozen land is teeming with life – flowers, grasses, bushes, birds, insects.

Ah yes, the insects – let me count the ways. The familiar mosquito: it buzzes as it comes by, and I’m told that the bite doesn’t itch afterwards if you don’t disturb it while it’s feeding, but who can watch it suck their blood and just let it be? The ubiquitous midge: an arctic variant of a Scottish favourite. It doesn’t buzz, but settles gently around the face and neck unleashing little hills of itchy unpleasantness. The humble fly: in this part of the world known to bite, mainly detested for its sheer insistence. The horse fly: usually moves in a pack, has the most fearsome bite of all so even the thought of it is enough to make me quiver.

Generally speaking insects don’t bother us immediately around the house, appearing to respect it as our territory, but as soon as we step out into the overgrown grass beyond then it seems we’re fair game. When we left here two months ago we had a garden of snow, and sometime when that snow melted there must have been a brief period when it almost looked like a garden, or at least like a backyard. But long hours of daylight make greenery leap, so the garden is now an untamed nature reserve, with areas of wild meadow and tall grass, full of insects and wildlife. Sooner or later this has to be cut, but it’s already too late for a lawnmower, it’s far too high. A scythe is the only answer. We’ll work and work on it over the next month, and we’ll only just get it to a manageable height by the end of the summer, just before the snow comes again.

With insects in residence, tackling this jungle requires full protective clothing and a net over the head, which is not my idea of gardening in 27 degrees of heat. I’ve not been keen to get started.

There’s a stretch of decking running the width of our house, between us and the garden, with white painted wooden railings in front of it. Our neighbour tells us that locally this is called ‘the bridge’. When people arrive at the house they must come onto the bridge before they can knock on the door. As it’s a wooden house we hear their impending arrival a few seconds before the knock. They are on our house, but not in it.

The bridge is long enough for a short promenade, if you walk slowly and turn every minute. It’s the place for surveying but not really engaging with the outside world. Like the captain of a ship, on the bridge we give careful thought to the tasks ahead. The bridge is the place from which a ship – or in our case, our home – is commanded.

Running parallel to our bridge is our neighbour’s bridge. Far enough away not to be intrusive, but close enough to feel you aren’t alone at sea. Being on a hill we can look down from our bridge, or we can look sideways, to a neighbouring ship. Our neighbour often stands on her bridge in the night, watching her dog sniff the air, companionably observing the sky and distant land. We may still be up, reading, or talking quietly on our bridge. Sometimes we’ll wave to each other; ships passing in the night.

In these warm days which are literally never ending, the bridge is the place to be. In the evenings we eat there, looking out over the challenge which is our garden. The hares come out later, having no help from fading light it’s easy to watch them. There are young hares too, running between the bushes. It’s so hard to make the decision to go to bed when it’s always light and the sky has the promise of the continuing day.

We’ve just installed a hammock on our bridge. It’s perfect for being rocked to and fro in the breeze, for appreciating the time before starting something, the time that is in between.

May is the month of the great melt, usually accompanied by low hanging cloud, mist and fog, shrouding everything in a damp dull light. The snow isn’t quite gone, but the huge piles have shrunk, leaving small hills of white spread out on vast areas of yellow and beige grass.

The arctic hares (there are four, it seems, now resident in our garden) mirror this perfectly. Their bodies are now a pale beige, with small patches of white in their long ears, so when they curl themselves into a ball they look just like a small hill with remnants of snow on top. Our neighbour tells us that while we have been away they (the hares, not the neighbours) have been sitting in our flower beds, chewing. I try not to think about it. Such beautiful creatures – how can one mind them putting a few spring flowers in their diet after a long hard winter of frozen hay?

Seeds underground are feeling the power of hours of daylight and are pushing shoots to the surface. Sparrows have emerged to devour the fat ball we put outside in the winter (then too frozen for them to eat). Dogs in the street look frisky. They can smell the promise of long light days in the fjäll, hunting arctic grouse and sunning themselves on a warm rock.

And yet all around us is a desolate scene. Kiruna emerging from the snow is a very ugly duckling indeed. It is not a pretty sight, and rather than make the best of it, Kiruna seems hell bent on the opposite.

Piles of rubbish strewn in every direction. Discarded cans, bottles, bits of metal, paper, broken tools, old furniture, old advertising signs, flags, broken road cones. The roads are awash with grit (put down during this very warm winter, when melting and freezing brought more ice to the roads than usual) and any remaining snow is pitted with grey. Those houses that looked so charming in the winter, nestling in a vale of white snow, are now revealed to be houses with the paint peeling off and gutters at an angle, surrounded by six different kinds of vehicles which may not be fit to drive. The vehicles are mimicked in plastic versions for the children, piled up around the trampolines standing untidily in the drab grey yards.

Even at the local supermarket the theme continues. Cardboard boxes piling up inside and out, glass doors grey with dust. All the cars in the car park need a good wash but no-one bothers; there’s too much dirt around – no point. Who cares? No-one’s looking – the winter visitors have gone, the summer visitors haven’t arrived. Kiruna is having its ugly period.

I’ve just been outside picking up rubbish visible from the house. Scanning the earth piles I found mostly sweet paper wrappers, blown under the snow, trapped there for months probably. Old bottles long ago thrown purposefully over our garden fence by Saturday night revellers, neatly disappearing into our snow piles. Scatterings of cigarette ends, discarded by our b and b guests – at the time they would have been covered in pure white in seconds. Now all is revealed, dirty and dusty after their winter hibernation.

I walked back to the house like a contestant on ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’, proudly clutching one large bag of rubbish, and another bag of plastic Christmas stars. But the stars won’t win me any favours because I am way way ahead of the season. This season – of not bothering to clear anything up – lasts at least another week.

Then, one day, next week maybe, or perhaps the week after, the grass will turn green, flowers will become visible in odd places, in clumps of pink and purple, and there will be school children out in the streets, in organised groups, picking up all the litter. That will be the sign – that’s when Kiruna will begin to clear up its backyard. Rubbish and rusting equipment will be driven to the dump, vehicles will be assigned to scrap and others taken out to the summer house, summer pots will come out, newly planted with bulbs, and the front and back yards will be tidied and filled with barbecues and garden furniture. On the streets machines will remove all the left over grit and wash the streets clean, grass will be cut and flowerbeds prepared. The season of ugliness will be over for another year.

A hush hangs over Kiruna. It’s Saturday morning, and yet barely a car passes by. No-one’s out walking their dogs outside our house, or struggling home up the hill with bags of shopping. Kiruna seems almost deserted. It’s the weekend of Rautas Premiere…

Let me explain. Rautas is a river – a big river – which north and west of here forms a wide section more like a lake, in a deep valley between two mountains. It’s rich in fish, but the authorities have decreed that, to preserve the fish stocks, there will be no fishing in Rautas until this particular weekend in March. Rautas Premiere.

This has been the case for so many years that it’s become a strong tradition, and families seem keen to preserve it. Traditionally people didn’t wait until sometime in the week after the first allowed date for fishing to head out for Rautas – they’d be there right from the beginning. That meant driving a couple of hours by snow scooter along a winding and bumpy track, in a slow queue behind all the other people from Kiruna, to spend the weekend at Rautas fishing among a mass of other people. Nowadays the queues are so long, and the track (through overuse) so poor, that, to beat the crowds, many people head out the day before. (This is what is known in Swedish as a ‘Tjuvstart’, or a ‘Thieving start’.)

For their time in Rautas people will come well prepared. This will involve at the very least bringing a tent, equipment for cooking, and some cans of beer. Most people will also have (neatly folded in their trailers) their own home-made ‘arc’ – a small portable shed to sleep in, which conveniently comes with a hole in the floor to fish through.

From this point the particular rituals and experiences that make up ‘Rautas Premiere’ are shrouded in mystery. Every year we see the trails of snow scooters heading out to Rautas, but they leave us behind at the road side. Not owning a snow scooter, we cannot follow.

So what happens beyond the mountain is a well kept local secret. A bit like a freemasonry meeting perhaps. I imagine locals greeting each other with a fish stuck in their ear, muttering secret codes to identify one another – ‘it’s a fishy business’ perhaps, or ‘last one to put a fish on the fire is a cissy’. We may never know.

Spring is a relative thing. In emails from England the traditional signs of spring – daffodils and cherry trees – are dangled, virtually, in front of me. I’m never quite sure if this is out of kindness, sympathy, or mischievousness. It is supposed, by the senders, that spring is not here yet, and that I will be depressed and wishing I was further south. Even though last year at this time I tried to explain.

But let me try again. Spring is a relative thing. Here it isn’t heralded by daffs and crocuses waving in a park. Instead we have bird song, rapidly increasing light, bewildering brightness, fluctuating temperatures and patches of lake turning icy blue. The sun is warm, and in the fjäll, green moss pokes through the snow. Some of the rivers have begun to melt a little and the trickle of water can be heard between the clinking of ice moving between cliffs of frozen snow.

These signs of spring bring me the same feeling of uplift, of hope and life, as a daffodil bobbing in the breeze. It’s hard, it seems, for people to understand that spring here is a beautiful thing, as beautiful as spring further south. Though very different.

Of course we have our off days. Quite a few actually. Today, for instance, it’s blowing a snowstorm out there. But yesterday we were skiing across a lake, blue sky and mountains around us. By the side of the lake great tits dipped and dived in the birch trees.

We had lunch on a rock, digging our feet into the snow, faces turned to the sun. Behind us a large patch of ice on the rock was retreating back into the lake – our coffee cups were resting on a natural ice bar. In between the rocks we even found insects. We saw a small spider perched delicately on the surface of the crusty snow. That small spider knew it was spring.

When children come here during the school terms you wonder how their parents have arranged it. This week I found out – it’s called Home Schooling. It was ‘a Geography Field Trip’, the parents said.

Their trip seemed mainly to involve shopping in town and downhill skiing, but maybe that’s what they teach in Geography these days – how to navigate around the hiking and walking section in ‘Inter Sport’, and the skiing qualities of snow at minus 5 degrees.

However, today our own Geography Field Trip was more traditional. It involved a map. We like maps, and look at them a lot, but we’ve had some trouble connecting the maps with the landscape, so we determined that today we really would Name That Mountain. We stopped at many lay-bys and tried to identify a familiar peak in the distance, and we looked at what the map could tell us about the landscape around.

It was a revelation. Roads are only a fraction of the story – a landscape is really understood through its rivers, valleys, lakes and mountains. In this landscape – parts of which are inaccessible all year round and other parts accessible only for short periods – it’s quite hard to understand how it all links up, until you look at a map.

Being able to name a mountain or a river valley imprints it in the memory, and makes it easier to see what you are looking at when you look out over a wide landscape. Names here can be in Swedish, Finnish, or Sami, or all three. Some of these names are very hard to remember – such as Njuohcamjävri, or Vuohnajokka – and others, like Bergfors, are fortunately much easier. After a while you work out that a ‘jävri’ is a lake, a ‘jokka’ a river, and a ‘varri’ a mountain. We finally got to put the real name on the mountain we’ve always called ‘the cloud stealing mountain’ (for obvious reasons). Now we know it’s Nagirvarri we not only have its name but we also now know that its nearby lake is called Nagirjärvi and its connecting river valley is Nagireatnu. And equally important, we now know where they are.

We had another purpose with the map. This is a road we’ve driven along very many times and travelling along it recalls our history too. I wanted to find a way to record the parts of the journey that have particular memories for us. I was thinking of aboriginal ‘songlines’, which I read about in Bruce Chatwin’s book. I think with all its memories over the years I could ‘sing’ the story of the E10 to Riksgränsen.

Some of the memories are places we set out from walking, or exploring. Others are where we had an encounter, perhaps met and talked to someone memorable. Or where we saw an animal or a bird. Or where we suddenly remembered we hadn’t switched off the coffee machine and had to return home in a hurry. Small insignificant memories, you might say, but together they represent the shared experience we relive every time we drive along the road.

Our field trip was both Geography, and History, Map Reading and Storytelling. We returned home rich in thought and knowledge.